Shakin’ things up a bit

Categories: Technology, Training

One of my biggest challenges is keeping myself from falling into a rut. Eating the same foods, laundry on the same days, although in lots of ways, adhering to a healthy routine can be efficient and constructive, this is not the case when it comes to a workout. And lately I’ve found myself defaulting to a fairly redundant weight workout that I’m sure by now my body is getting next to nothing out of.

Until late last year my Dayrunner and I were pretty much joined at the hip. For those of you that don’t know what a Dayrunner is, think stone-tablet-era, paper-based organizing tool in book form. So last December hubby presented me with an iPod Touch for my birthday. This admitted borderline technophobe took the bull by the horns so to speak and the rest is history. I am officially paperless for 7 months and counting and have come galloping, strolling, ok inching into the 21st century.

Anyway sorry for the digression. My point is that on said iPod Touch, I downloaded an “app” called Nike Training Club and tried it yesterday for the first time. It’s basically a quick workout: a 3-minute warmup followed by seven different exercises you do for two minutes each, then a couple of yogic cool down moves. So you’re on your way in 2o minutes. All the moves are demonstrated in video form and a timer counts down for you. Truly a no-brainer. I can’t say any particular move was terribly hard, and that’s fine. But put together it was a comprehensive routine that got me sweating and today I can tell by the way my high hamstings are whining, that it shook me out of my rut. I’m sure there’s more to this app I have yet to explore. Check it out yourself and I’ll keep you posted as well.

In keeping with today’s theme of shaking things up, I swapped today’s usual tempo run for Sunday’s long run. Since I’ll be at the Nike Women’s Festival this Sunday I figured that 10k would more closely emulate a tempo run. And not wanting to either tack on additional mileage post-race (a guaranteed death sentence) or crack the door to failure in Columbus and blow off the long run entirely I traded my sunglasses for a headlamp this morning and got out for a pre-COD 15-miler. Hate to say it but we’re already losing lots of morning daylight. The first miles were a tad leaden but things picked up and I managed to grind out all negative splits. Most likely I’ll be begging for a nap later, but it was a great feeling of accomplishment to have 15 under my belt by 6:30am.